Thesaurus

The ICPSR Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary system. Development of the ICPSR Thesaurus was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES-9977984).

  • Personal Names Authority List provides controlled name forms and spellings. Unlike the Subject and the Geographic lists, it is non-hierarchical (there are no broader/narrower, or related term designations). This list is designed to provide name form consistency and, through the use of a "description" (DSC) note field, enable users to distinguish between same or similar names and to determine whether the person/name is appropriate to their indexing or searching needs.
  • Organization Names Authority List is an alphabetical authority list of name forms for organizations listed in ICPSR metadata as funding agencies or as corporate authors/principal investigators.
  • Subject Thesaurus is an alphabetical listing of social science subject terms. The scope of this thesaurus is multidisciplinary and is intended to reflect the subject range of the ICPSR archive. Social science disciplines represented include: political science, sociology, history, economics, education, criminal justice, gerontology, demography, public health, law, and international relations.
  • Geographic Names Thesaurus provides controlled name forms and spellings. Unlike the Subject and the Geographic lists, it is non-hierarchical (there are no broader/narrower, or related term designations). This list is designed to provide name form consistency and, through the use of a "description" (DSC) note field, enable users to distinguish between same or similar names and to determine whether the person/name is appropriate to their indexing or searching needs.

A Bibliography (PDF 12K) of reference documents and thesauri used to prepare the ICPSR controlled vocabulary system

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